Doing the Legwork : Sampson Has Different Plan for U.S. Soccer Program
It will never be easy for Steve Sampson to look back at his experience as coach of the U.S. men’s soccer team that did so poorly at the 1998 World Cup.
So Sampson will look ahead.
Six months, more or less, since the U.S. team left France winless and its coach left friendless, Sampson is eager to be back at work in his new job as technical director of the California Youth Soccer Assn.-South (CYSAS).
The organization is headquartered in Fullerton, but it is Sampson’s charge to identify all the best young soccer players, boys and girls, from Bakersfield to San Diego.
Some Sampson critics will giggle now and saying that he couldn’t identify enough of the best adult soccer players for the U.S. team, and that he didn’t know what to do with the ones he had.
But that is the same simplistic attitude that prompts so many owners to fire the coach rather than change the team or the system or the organization.
And so Sampson is ignoring his critics and taking on a large task.
In his own words, he is “trying to find a way to restructure the Olympic Development Program (ODP). There’s a great need to restructure, but the politics didn’t allow for that.
“Finally we have a state association that is prepared to take the risk of going from the tryout format to a scouting structure. I believe this will be the model for the rest of the country.”
Whew. Are these delusions of grandeur or a true blueprint to remake U.S. soccer from the grass-roots up?
Sampson speaks so quickly and passionately and needs to be asked, finally, to slow down and explain. It turns out Sampson has been thinking long and hard about his and soccer’s future. He did not take this job of running youth soccer in Southern California lightly.
Yes, he would like to eventually get back into professional coaching, something he says “I am well qualified for, considering the level I have been at.” But until then, Sampson is determined to find a better way to find the players who will eventually play in World Cup tournaments.
Sampson says he discovered as U.S. national coach that the system used to identify talented young soccer players was unwieldy and ineffective.
“In the past in California,” he says, “kids would have to try out at the district level. Each county is a district. Kids would have to pay $25 each to try out. Right away you lose a lot of kids who couldn’t afford $25. In each age group there’d be 300-500 kids trying out on a single weekend, and it would be up to the district coach to pick the top 20-30.
“A lot of club coaches didn’t feel the best players were getting identified or developed at the district level so those kids wouldn’t go to trials. There were unwritten battles between the top clubs in Southern California and the ODP squads. There’d be politics. Kids would get chosen for higher levels based on who their coaches were at the district and state levels.”
What Sampson had advocated during his many speaking engagements, clinics and public appearances in his time as national coach was something different. He would like to have paid scouts, men and women who have at least played soccer at the college level, to go out and watch club, school teams and district teams. They would work the phones and talk to coaches and then chose the players who would be invited to the various levels of the ODP.
In the Southern California district, for example, Sampson thinks that too often the best ethnic players, Latinos and Asians, have been missed because either the child couldn’t afford the $25 tryout fee or that their coaches weren’t part of the circle of ODP coaches. They weren’t, in other words, part of the in-crowd.
That is the battle Sampson will fight as he moves ahead with his plan. It is why Ray Horspool, president of CYSAS, hired Sampson. Horspool agrees with Sampson’s view. But Sampson knows he will meet resistance. There will be district-level coaches who will not be happy that these newly hired scouts, for whom Sampson is already advertising, will be taking over the job of finding and evaluating talent.
“This system has been in place for the last 25 years in this country,” Sampson says. “We’re the first state organization to try something new. So, yeah, there will be some resistance.”
In fact, two CYSAS coaches said they wondered how these newly hired scouts could come to Southern California and find the best players. But these coaches wouldn’t speak for attribution and Sampson says resistance to change is to be expected.
“There is going to be a microscope on Southern California,” Sampson says. “There would be resistance all over the country. What I’m doing is a dramatic change from the status quo. But I think the change will be embraced if given an opportunity.
“Coaching is my passion but I also feel like it’s my obligation to give something back to the sport, for me to communicate in a grass-roots way what I’ve learned. There’s very few people in this country who have ever experienced what I have as the only American to coach in two World Cups. It’s my obligation now to work with the youth programs.”
So the experiment begins. Sampson expects to begin hiring scouts next month. He will admit that “our results at the World Cup weren’t what we expected,” but insists that his World Cup experience was not a failure and that soccer is indeed still growing in the United States.
And Sampson seems ready to stick his neck out again. He stuck it out by becoming the first native-born American national team coach and has taken plenty of criticism for his performance. Now he’s ready to shake up the status quo again.
C’mon critics, Sampson’s defiant tone of voice demands. Change is coming again. Deal with it.
Diane Pucin can be reached by e-mail at diane.pucin@latimes.com
